I know a lot of you out there are interested in improving your search engine results, understanding PageRank, and in general, monetizing your content.

Well, this weekend, how about taking a breather from all of that and contemplating how Google generates those search results? Those pages you get back when you punch keywords into the search engine are dynamically generated in real time. That means that every search index effectively has an entire copy of the internet in its data center.

Now, this may not have much to do with your business, but trust me, this is a pretty amazing feat of engineering. Not a Great Wall of China kinda feat or anything, but certainly a Herculean task.

If you're a computer science fellow, take a look at Google's BigTable white paper. If you're not, but still vaguely comprehend what a pointer is and want to try to get your head around data relationships in n-dimensions (the visual model tends to break down for me somewhere around three, personally :-) ), enjoy.

Comments

On 2007-11-05 10:22:05 Advice Network Writing contest said:Wow, papers like that one make me glad I'm NOT the CEO or founder of Google. That stuff was dense.